![]() ![]() IE: I just want to be able to say "Hey, Firefox. I'm worried this will be the next stage in the battle for our attention - best case: companies will buy popular plugins to track us and show us intrusive ads worst case: nefarious actors will buy them to scrape information we think is private and collect it. I feel like in the last year, I've read a couple stories about companies buying successful plugins and then using them to track you or show ads or whatever. ![]() What I really want now is the ability to exclude entire websites from any permissions I grant to plugins. To list a few:Ĭhannel Blocker (lets me block channels from search results on Youtube) Ĭonsent-O-Matic (auto fill cookie consent forms) īasically, if I visit a website and don't like the experience, I either never go back (Kagi lets me exclude it from search results) or find a plugin to make it tolerable. ![]() Lately, I find myself using more and more plugins to make the "modern web" tolerable. That’s a natural result of the choices of a large number of consumers.I recommend using an ad-blocker while visiting that site :-/ “If too many people block ads, some currently free online material might no longer be free. And it’s not always unethical to do things that hurt a business,” said Sara Baase, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at San Diego State University. “It’s not unethical to do things because other people don’t like them. For the philosopher Immanuel Kant, this was core to the concept of the Categorical Imperative, part of which holds that actions are only ethical if everyone did them all the time.Įthicists don’t have much compassion here either, and argue that readers aren’t ethically obligated to support business models that can’t sustain themselves. ![]() “When someone signs a contract, implicit or otherwise, you’re talking about informed consent, which doesn’t exist here.”īut one ethical wrinkle to the pro-ad blocking argument is the question of what happens to the Web when a critical mass of people start using ad blocking software and make it nearly impossible for publishers to make money. “If this was a deal between users and publishers, it would be easier to go for, but as soon as you introduce these intermediaries, it looks a lot less solicited and more unethical,” said Robin Wilton, director for Identity and Privacy at the Internet Society. This, ethicists argue, is why there’s nothing ethicially wrong with people using ad blockers to protect themselves. These third parties, which track readers across the Web and use the data to serve targeted ads, are still largely invisible to most people, who don’t get a full picture of all the parties in the transaction. “Anyone who says that online advertising is annoying and distracting is absolutely right.”įurther complicating the deal between publishers and readers are all the ad tech companies and ad networks that publishers plug into their pages. “In this case, ad blocking is completely ethical because it by far benefits more people than it harms,” he said. There are over 144 million active ad block users around the world, according to a 2014 report from PageFair and Adobe.ĭavid Whittier, a former professor of cyberethics at Boston University, said the clearest defense of ad blocking comes from utilitarianism, which suggests that the most ethical action is the one that maximizes utility. More people are understanding the appeal. That explains the appeal of ad blockers, which not only make pages easier to read but also speeds up load times and cut down on security risks. ![]()
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